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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Odd Couple: International Trade And Labor Standards In History. By Michael Huberman. New Haven, Ct: Yale University Press, 2012. Pp. Xii, 237. $65.00, Cloth., Joshua L. Rosenbloom
Odd Couple: International Trade And Labor Standards In History. By Michael Huberman. New Haven, Ct: Yale University Press, 2012. Pp. Xii, 237. $65.00, Cloth., Joshua L. Rosenbloom
Joshua L. Rosenbloom
The years between 1870 and 1914 constituted a first episode of globalization, characterized by rising levels of international trade and robust economic growth. They were also, at least in Europe, the time when important elements of the welfare state—insurance against the risks of unemployment, sickness, industrial accidents, and old age—as well as labor protections—such as factory inspection and limits on the hours of work of women and children—were first introduced.
Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, And Civic Identity In Colonizing English America, 1580–1865. By Christopher Tomlins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. Xvi, 617. $115.00, Cloth; $36.99, Paper., Joshua L. Rosenbloom
Joshua L. Rosenbloom
For proponents of institutional economics, laws are one of the humanly devised constraints that structure human interactions. Like other formal and informal constraints, they define the incentive structure of societies and economies. In Freedom Bound, Christopher Tomlins subtly shifts the emphasis, suggesting that we think of laws not simply as constraints but as a “technology” that provides “. . . a means by which designs, structures, institutions might be imagined, created, implemented, andimplanted” (p. 506). Viewed as technology, legal thought is both a tool enabling action and a constraint, channeling that action in specific directions.
Labor-Market Regimes In U.S. Economic History, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, William A. Sundstrom
Labor-Market Regimes In U.S. Economic History, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, William A. Sundstrom
Joshua L. Rosenbloom
In much economic analysis it is a convenient fiction to suppose that changes over time in wages and employment are determined by shifts in supply or demand within a more or less competitive market framework Indeed, this framework has been effectively deployed to understand many episodes in American economic history. We argue here, however, that by minimizing the role of labor-market institutions such an approach is incomplete. Drawing on the history of American labor markets over two centuries, we argue that institutions—by which we mean both formal and informal rules that constrain the choices of economic agents—have played a significant …
Commodity Exports, Invisible Exports And Terms Of Trade For The Middle Colonies, 1720 To 1775, Peter Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, Thomas J. Weiss
Commodity Exports, Invisible Exports And Terms Of Trade For The Middle Colonies, 1720 To 1775, Peter Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, Thomas J. Weiss
Joshua L. Rosenbloom
Economic historians of the eighteenth-century British mainland North American colonies have given considerable weight to the role of exports as a stimulus for economic growth. Yet their analyses have been handicapped by reliance on one or two time series to serve as indicators of broader changes rather than considering the export sector as a whole. Here we present new comprehensive export measures for the middle colonies. We find that aggregate exports in constant prices grew very quickly, but barely faster than population during the period under consideration. Furthermore, improvements in the terms of trade increased the colonists’ ability to buy …
Kansas In The Great Depression: Work Relief, The Dole, And Rehabilitation. By Peter Fearon. Columbia And London: University Of Missouri Press, 2007. Pp. Xv, 316. $44.95., Joshua L. Rosenbloom
Kansas In The Great Depression: Work Relief, The Dole, And Rehabilitation. By Peter Fearon. Columbia And London: University Of Missouri Press, 2007. Pp. Xv, 316. $44.95., Joshua L. Rosenbloom
Joshua L. Rosenbloom
The provision of welfare in the United States was transformed in the 1930s as county-based relief efforts collapsed under the burden of massive and sustained unemployment. The system of federal-state partnership that emerged in its place developed less through systematic and conscious planning than as the accidental result of a process of trial and error driven by the interaction between federal government officials and their counterparts in the states. In Kansas in the Great Depression Peter Fearon offers a careful examination of how efforts to address the pressing needs of the unemployed evolved in one state, Kansas, over the course …
The Geography Of Innovation Commercialization In The United States During The 1990s, Joshua L. Rosenbloom
The Geography Of Innovation Commercialization In The United States During The 1990s, Joshua L. Rosenbloom
Joshua L. Rosenbloom
This article analyzes the geographic distribution and interrelationship of three measures of innovation commercialization across the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the United States and estimates a model of the factors explaining variations in the location of innovation commercialization. Innovation commercialization tends to be highly concentrated geographically, suggesting the presence of substantial external economies in these functions. Beyond these scale effects, however, the author finds that university science and engineering capacity and local patenting activity both help to account for intercity differences in the level of innovation commercialization activity.
Exports And Slow Economic Growth In The Lower South Region, 1720–1800, Peter C. Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, Thomas Weiss
Exports And Slow Economic Growth In The Lower South Region, 1720–1800, Peter C. Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, Thomas Weiss
Joshua L. Rosenbloom
For the past generation scholars have emphasized that the Lower South was one of the most economically successful regions of British mainland North America, and perhaps the most successful. Planters, the primary economic actors, made extensive use of slave labor and created a successful staple-export sector, which by 1774 produced the highest levels of private wealth per capita in the colonies. Focusing on the rapid growth of the primary exports of the Lower South in the colonial period – rice and indigo – most scholars have concluded that standards of living for colonists in the region must have been rising …
Reexamining The Distribution Of Wealth In 1870, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, Gregory W. Stutes
Reexamining The Distribution Of Wealth In 1870, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, Gregory W. Stutes
Joshua L. Rosenbloom
This paper uses data on real and personal property ownership collected in the 1870 Federal Census to explore factors influencing individual wealth accumulation and the aggregate distribution of wealth in the United States near the middle of the nineteenth century. Previous analyses of these data have relied on relatively small samples, or focused on population subgroups. By using the much larger sample available in the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) we are able to disaggregate the data much more finely than has previously been possible allowing us to explore differences in inequality across space and between different population groups. …
The Decline And Rise Of Interstate Migration In The United States: Evidence From The Ipums, 1850-1990, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, William A. Sundstrom
The Decline And Rise Of Interstate Migration In The United States: Evidence From The Ipums, 1850-1990, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, William A. Sundstrom
Joshua L. Rosenbloom
We document long-run trends in interstate migration rates, using individual-level data from the U.S. Census for the period 1850–1990. Two measures of migration are calculated. The first considers an individual to have moved if she is residing in a state different from her state of birth. The second considers a family to have moved if it is residing in a state different from the state of birth of one of its young children, allowing us to estimate the timing of moves more precisely. Overall migration propensities have followed a U-shaped trend since 1850, falling until around 1900 and then rising …
Path Dependence And The Origins Of Cotton Textile Manufacturing In New England, Joshua L. Rosenbloom
Path Dependence And The Origins Of Cotton Textile Manufacturing In New England, Joshua L. Rosenbloom
Joshua L. Rosenbloom
During the first half of the nineteenth century the United States emerged as a major producer of cotton textiles. This paper argues that the expansion of domestic textile production is best understood as a path-dependent process that was initiated by the protection provided by the Embargo Act of 1807 and the War of 1812. This initial period of protection ended abruptly in 1815 with the conclusion of the war and the resumption of British imports, but the political climate had been irreversibly changed by the temporary expansion of the industry. After 1815 nascent manufacturers sought to protect the investments they …
David Brian Robertson. Capital, Labor, And State: The Battle For American Labor Markets From The Civil War To The New Deal. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. Pp. Xxii, 297. $22.95, Paper., Joshua L. Rosenbloom
David Brian Robertson. Capital, Labor, And State: The Battle For American Labor Markets From The Civil War To The New Deal. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. Pp. Xxii, 297. $22.95, Paper., Joshua L. Rosenbloom
Joshua L. Rosenbloom
American employers today enjoy considerably greater latitude in the labor market than do employers in other industrialized economies. Laws protecting unions are weaker, employers can more easily hire and fire workers, minimum-wage laws are less binding, the government plays a smaller role in managing the labor market through public employment offices, and work and unemployment insurance programs are smaller and less costly to employers in the United States than elsewhere. In this book David Brian Robertson, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, offers an explanation for the unique pattern of labor-market governance that has …
The Boston Renaissance: Race, Space, And Economic Change In An American Metropolis. By Barry Bluestone And Mary Huff Stevenson, With Contributions From Michael Massagli, Philip Moss, And Chris Tilly. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000. Pp. Xiii, 461. $45.00., Joshua L. Rosenbloom
Joshua L. Rosenbloom
The greater Boston area has experienced a remarkable economic resurgence in the last two decades. Beginning in the late nineteenth century the declining fortunes of its leading manufacturing industries—textiles and boots and shoes—contributed to a sustained economic slide that was not reversed until the early 1980s. By 1982 a Brookings Institution study citing high and rising unemployment, rising crime rates, poor housing, municipal debt burden and tax disparity ranked the Boston SMSA near the bottom of urban America, below cities such as Detroit, Gary, Newark, and Oakland. These trends were sharply reversed in the 1980s and early 1990s, however. Propelled …
Conjectural Estimates Of Economic Growth In The Lower South, 1720 To 1800, Peter C. Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, Thomas Weiss
Conjectural Estimates Of Economic Growth In The Lower South, 1720 To 1800, Peter C. Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, Thomas Weiss
Joshua L. Rosenbloom
This paper describes the first step in a larger project to build up regional estimates of economic growth before 1800 in the parts of North America that became the United States. In it we employ the method of conjectural estimation to develop new estimates of the rate of economic growth in the Lower South (modern day North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee) from 1720 to 1800 for both colonists and the Native American population of the region. Contrary to the widely held view that GDP per capita grew at a rate of 0.3 to 0.6 percent per year during …
The Challenges Of Economic Maturity: New England, 1880-1940, Joshua L. Rosenbloom
The Challenges Of Economic Maturity: New England, 1880-1940, Joshua L. Rosenbloom
Joshua L. Rosenbloom
This paper provides an account of the complex changes taking place within New England in the years from 1880 to 1940. After 1880, technological changes and market shifts undermined the sources of comparative advantage that had promoted the concentration of textile and footwear production within the region and propelled regional economic growth. Despite the decline of these industries after 1880, New England's history after 1880 can hardly be characterized as one of economic decline. Regional economic growth did slow in the wake of these events, but the impact of this slowdown on living standards was moderated, by market driven adjustments …
Employer Recruitment And The Integration Of Industrial Labor Markets, 1870-1914, Joshua L. Rosenbloom
Employer Recruitment And The Integration Of Industrial Labor Markets, 1870-1914, Joshua L. Rosenbloom
Joshua L. Rosenbloom
The substantial shifts in the sectoral and geographic location of economic activity that took place in the late nineteenth-century United States required the reallocation of large quantities of labor. This paper examines the response of labor market institutions to the challenges of unbalanced growth. Based on previously unexploited descriptive evidence from the reports of the Immigration Commission it argues that employer recruitment was crucial to the adjustment of labor markets to shifting patterns of supply and demand. Because individual employers could capture only a fraction of the benefits of recruitment, however, investment in this activity may have been less than …